


Cyborg

by ceywoozle



Series: One Word Bottomjohn Prompts [46]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Awkward Conversations, Don't Try This At Home, M/M, metal bits where they have no business being
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-25
Updated: 2015-02-25
Packaged: 2018-03-15 01:14:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3432620
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ceywoozle/pseuds/ceywoozle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Part of the One Word Bottomjohn Prompt Series.</p><p>Sherlock came home a changed man.</p><p>(Idea shamelessly stolen from that hilarious sci fi gay romance book cover that occasionally pops up on Tumblr. Yeah you know which one I mean.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cyborg

Sherlock was different. After the fall, after he'd come back—scarred and swaggering and crawling too close to the edges of inhuman—John had wondered how far was too far, if Sherlock had finally discovered the place from which he could never quite return.

It didn't last forever, of course. John never really had noticed the influence he had in humanising Sherlock. He did notice the softness creeping back, however. The sharp edges filing slowly down. He didn't credit himself, naturally, but he noticed them and was grateful. He was grateful when the tension slowly drained from both of them and after Moriarty, after Magnussen, after Mary...things slowly went back to normal. Or at least, as normal as it would ever be with Sherlock Holmes and John Watson under the same roof.

But things.... _levelled._ And for a long time, they were happy. And John didn't find out about the... _changes_ for a long time.

When he did, it was an accident. Sherlock was cooking and John, still flushed with the newness of what they had become, had grinned and crept up behind him, snaking arms around Sherlock's lean waist and pressing his face into a silken shoulder. Sherlock, humming with pleasure, turned in his arms and kissed him.

Everything stopped for a bit. The world too soft to hold down. It shifted under the grasping pressure of their kiss, slipping elusively away.

It was the smell that brought John back, chemicals burning, acrid and toxic in the closed air, and he pulled away, looking around for the source, and finding it behind Sherlock. He had stared in uncomprehending horror at the melted blackened clump of _something_ that was attached to the end of Sherlock's wrist where it was leaning on the lit burner.

“Sherlock, what—”

“Oh damn,” Sherlock muttered, and pulled his arm casually away from the stinking clump of melted goo now stuck to their stove. The bits that were not quite blackened yet stretched like gum and snapped.

“Sherlock. What. The. Fuck.”

Sherlock flickered an irritated glance at him. “Don't be so melodramatic, John.”

“Sherlock. _Your hand.”_

“Yes, well, it's not real, obviously. Here, hold on a second,” and saying so, he'd taken his other hand and with careful fingers began peeling the skin back just below his left elbow. John stared with a sense of dawning horror, until the first glint of metal had shown beneath the peeled back flesh, and then he'd stared in fascination as the skin fell back and Sherlock had stood there, revealed in the middle of their kitchen with a gleaming steel stump attached to his left arm.

“Sherlock?” John said carefully. “Is there something you forgot to tell me?”

“Well it never really came up,” Sherlock said a little guiltily.

John stared at him. “Has this always...have I never...?”

“No, no, don't be ridiculous. Only since I came back from Eastern Europe before the whole Magnussen debacle.”

“Oh. Right. So only five or six years or so.”

“Right. Only that.”

“Right.”

They looked at each other for a moment.

“So,” John said. “Did you want to tell me...?”

“Oh. Erm. Knife wound got infected. Had to amputate. Mycroft put this together, of course.” He grimaced at the globs of melted plastic on the stove and sighed. “I'm never going to hear the end of this.”

“No, you really won't,” John agreed. He squinted at the metal stump, now unadorned at the end of Sherlock's arm, four inches wide and at least twelve long. “You know,” he said thoughtfully. “It...reminds me of something.”

Sherlock blinked at him, then looked down at the rounded metal cylinder at the end of his left arm. “You know what,” he said. “It reminds me of something, too.”

~~~~~~~~~~

John cries out at his second orgasm is torn from him. He pants, sweaty and shaking on the bed, and feels like he's being dragged apart as the heated metal of Sherlock's false arm pulls reluctantly out of his body.

“Oh god!” he gasps, collapsing into the his pillow. “Oh Jesus bloody Christ, Sherlock. That was amazing.”

There is a low chuckle at his ear as Sherlock curls up beside him, and an arm—one of flesh and blood—wraps around John and drags him close. 

“I admit,” he says, low and pleased, “I didn't think you'd be able to take it.”

John gasps laughingly and grins. “Anything for my cyborg boyfriend.”


End file.
